Seeing Red: Moral Outrage and the Making of a Red Shirt Identity

• In Event: Bridging Region and Discipline: Social Movement Studies and Southeast Asia II

Abstract

Emerging from Thailand’s ongoing political crisis, the Red Shirts are a social movement of momentous importance but have yet to be the focus of an in-depth study. What has compelled so many Thais – millions, if the correlation between Red Shirt support and voting patterns is to be believed – to identify to varying degrees with this label? My research examines the role both class and regionalism have played in the creation of the ‘Red’ identity but adds ‘corroborated excess empirical content’ to the existing literature by viewing the social movement through an emotional lens. The relative deprivation felt by the Red Shirts is not, as is often thought, driven primarily by income disparity. Rather, it is a combination of being denied political rights by successive attacks on their elected representatives and being denied respect, as evidenced by their constant abasement by other sections of Thai society. As these feelings of relative deprivation intensified along with the political crisis, so too did the emotional response, enabling the movement to overcome the collective action problem and mobilise consistently large numbers of people who shared the same feelings of moral outrage. Sophisticated framing on the part of movement leaders then channelled these emotions into a movement which was extremely threatening to the traditional Thai elites and the social order which they had constructed.

Author

• James Buchanan, City University of Hong Kong